


Mending Durin

by lferion



Series: The Grey Book of Erebor [7]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, HobbitAdvent, Mini Wrimo 2013, Non-Metrical Poetry, Poetry, Possible DoS Spoilers, Post-Battle of Five Armies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 22:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo listens to a song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mending Durin

Art by Hermetic Wings, original found [here.](http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs14/i/2007/086/e/3/Chainmail_by_Hermetic_Wings.jpg)

* * *

All around the camp, [now that the immediate necessities were largely dealt with — the gravely wounded stable, the dead arranged for as kind and custom dictated and time allowed — ] people were mending things. Binding wounds, stitching cuts, lending ears and shoulders. Repairing armor; cleaning, sharpening, polishing out nicks in swords and axes; re-hafting pikes and spears; re-strapping shields, gleaning arrows, re-fletching, salvaging points. 

Bilbo watched, his tattered waistcoat in his lap. As the Dwarves worked, hands busy with needle and thread, wire and pliers, rivets and rings and scales, they began to sing. Just a murmuring hum at first, deep and slow, different notes and rhythms gradually coming together, until it became a tune, one Bilbo had heard before. 

_Ori, humming as he wrote or drew in his notebook, moonlight silvering his pages. Bifur, muttering tunefully and incomprehensibly as he carved by firelight. Dori and Nori, Balin and Dwalin, brothers singing under their breath as they worked in the brief hour between setting up camp and settling for sleep, words and phrases passed back and forth in harmony. Even Fili and Kili had apparently known it, the tune at least, though judging by the expressions on some of the other's faces, their words were not the usual ones. Once, very late at night, Thorin had sung an entire verse as he kept watch and carefully stitched up a tear in the leather of his coat, the quiet syllables rich and rough, sounding older and deeper than the song that had begun the journey all those weeks and months ago._

Bilbo had never understood the words, even when he could make them out, for they were not in Westron, and he had never quite dared to ask. But now, first one voice and then another joined the swelling harmony, and then Bofur began to sing, not in the language of the Dwarves, but the common tongue. 

How many times?  
As many as necessary.  
Needle and thread, sinew and bone  
Wax and water,  
All the tools  
Of Making and repair  
Gathered up again

Sew you back together  
Mend cracks in your heart  
Patch rents in your soul  
Darn the worn places in your memory  
Knit up the tattered threads of thought  
Polish the dulled stars  
Until they shine

Knot the silk, wool, cotton, linen  
Cut out the cloth,  
Crimp the wire  
Wax the thread  
Ready needles, pins, awl and snips,  
Pierce the places near the tears  
Fabric whole enough to hold

Draw up the ragged flesh  
Outer seeming torn  
By inner strife  
Reshape the stone that beats and breathes  
Stitch a seam to hold  
Breath and blood within  
Articulated form

Hammer out the dents  
Weld up the joints  
Lay in new bands,  
Rivet fast the links that bind  
Weary mind refreshed  
And will reforged  
To tempered and re-tempered soul

Make, remake, rejoin  
Together gather all the scattered beads  
To string again in strands:  
Braid and bind the lineaments  
Of personhood -  
The enduring shape  
Of you.

Set you once again  
To delve, and sing, craft and strive  
No patchwork thing  
But all remade aright and new  
Thus Durin wakes once more  
And walks,  
But not alone.

 

When the last note sank into silence, and the only sound for a moment was the crackle of campfires and the sigh of the wind, Bilbo found himself equal parts ready to address his own mending with new energy, and inexplicably damp-eyed and tight of throat. Around him, Dwarves and Men and even Elves seemed to have caught the spirit of the work-song, and there was a new and subtle sense of working together somehow. Presently someone struck up another song, cheerfully nonsensical, and conversations resumed, the industrious bustle of the camp washed over him. But the song stayed with him, and in the deepening twilight, Bilbo wished, fiercely, that not only might Durin one day wake and walk again, but that the Maker would watch over Durin's sons as well.

**Author's Note:**

> The story part was written for Hobbit Advent day 16, prompt: Jumpers. The connection with the prompt is by way of the idea of knitting, knitting up, knitting chainmail, mending.
> 
> The song was originally written for Mini-Wrimo 2013, inspired by the quote: _"Just how many times are you going to make me sew you back together again?"_ ~Nahoko Uehashi. In the context of the story, I figure that the piece is metrical in Khuzdul, and a little less so in Westron, but it isn't in English, thus the uneven form.


End file.
